September222012

"What civilization is, is 6 billion people trying to make
themselves happy by standing on each other’s shoulders and kicking each
other’s teeth in. It’s not a pleasant situation.

And yet, you can stand back and look at this planet and see that
we have the money, the power, the medical understanding, the scientific
know-how, the love and the community to produce a kind of human
paradise.

But we are led by the least among us - the least intelligent, the
least noble, the least visionary. We are led by the least among us and
we do not fight back against the dehumanizing values that are handed
down as control icons.

This is something: culture is not your friend. Culture is for
other people’s convenience and the convenience of various institutions,
churches, companies, tax collection schemes, what have you. It is not
your friend. It insults you. It disempowers you. It uses and abuses you.
None of us are well treated by culture.

Yet we glorify the creative potential of the individual, the
rights of the individual. We understand the felt-presence of experience
is what is most important.

But the culture is a perversion. It fetishizes objects, creates
consumer mania, it preaches endless forms of false happiness, endless
forms of false understanding in the form of squirrelly religions and
silly cults.

It invites people to diminish themselves and dehumanize
themselves by behaving like machines - meme processors of memes passed
down from Madison Avenue and Hollywood …"